Better in the Reruns
by WynterSky
Summary: A mix-up in the afterlife's filing system results in Neji being sent back in time after his death: can he use his second chance to prevent everything from going wrong?


[A/N: GUESS WHO'S ALIVE? ME! :D When moving files over to my new computer I realized I had a mostly-done story in my documents, so I'm going to start posting the finished parts and see if I can get it finished. I'm also going to try to update the fics already going!]

I.

Neji's first sensation was one of cold, and floating, and emptiness. When he opened his eyes tentatively to look around, all he could see around him was a blank, dark void. Since the last thing he remembered was bleeding out in Naruto's arms, he was fairly sure this was the afterlife. It didn't really live up to the hype.

"Oh gosh, not another one! I was supposed to go on break half an hour ago!"

Neji turned in surprise at the annoyed exclamation behind him, the movement making him bob in place slightly. The void was not so empty as he had first assumed: there was a large desk piled high with papers floating several meters away from him, and behind it, floating just above a chair that was floating underneath the desk, was a frazzled-looking woman. She was dressed in a tight blue jacket and skirt, and underneath the desk Neji could see a pair of very impractical-looking high heels on her feet. But since there was no floor, her choice of footwear didn't really matter.

"May I ask where I am?" Neji enquired politely.

"You _may_ , but I'm a little too busy to answer you…" the woman brushed back a few flyaway strands of wavy hair and straightened her glasses before digging into one of the stacks.

To be honest, Neji felt a bit hurt. This might be all in a day's work for her, but it was a one-time thing for him!

"Name?"

Neji blinked at the curt demand. "Hyuuga Neji," he answered.

"And age at death?"

"Eighteen," Neji murmured, absently laying a hand where his mortal injury had been. If he'd known it would end this way he wouldn't have neglected so many things until it was too late. Now Tenten would never know…

"Speak up, please," the woman said sharply, opening a file and flipping through its contents.

"I was eighteen," Neji repeated, slightly louder.

"Thank you, please wait a moment." The woman behind the desk stood, or rather began floating in a standing position, and waved imperatively at empty space. At her movement, a large row of filing cabinets appeared, floating slightly higher than the desk.

By this point, Neji was beginning to become accustomed to how the floating worked, and shifted into a relaxed lounging position as he waited for the woman to finish her paperwork. From the look of it, he would be here a while, for she kept summoning more and more filing cabinets into existence around her desk until there was a veritable labyrinth surrounding it on all sides, as well as above and below.

Finally she clapped her hands sharply, and all the filing cabinets vanished at once, leaving her with an armful of files. She flipped through these, then suddenly gave a scream of frustration and flung them all upwards into the void. Papers and files slowly fluttered downwards, vanishing one by one as they fell.

"You, um, Neji, come here for a moment, please," she called, seating herself primly at the desk as if the last frantic few minutes had never happened.

Neji approached the desk. Moving around the void, while not difficult, was a little disconcerting as he was propelling himself against empty space. It apparently took him longer to reach the desk than the woman would have preferred, for she clicked her tongue impatiently once he arrived.

"I'm sorry for the wait," she said in a businesslike tone. "Your papers seem to have been mislaid and it may take some time to find them. You can have some reruns while you wait, if you like."

"Reruns?" Neji echoed, confused.

"Just pick a time in your life you'd like to go back to," the woman explained briskly. "Now, now, off you pop!" she said, making a shooing motion with one hand. "It'll keep you out of my hair while I'm working, at least."

She didn't look like she wanted to have to deal with him anymore, so Neji floated back to his lounging spot (or as close to it as he could figure, as apart from the desk one place looked the same as another). If this was the afterlife, he wanted to be on the good side of whoever was in charge, so he should probably do as he was told. But he wasn't really sure what time he would most like to relive. Perhaps before his father died, but he had been too young to properly experience much of that and therefore might not get any more out of it the second time around. His childhood after that hadn't been much fun—part of that had been his own fault but not enough for him to want to repeat it. The Academy had been all right, but the first really pleasant memories he had involved his teammates and their mentor.

And if he was going to go back, he shouldn't start too late or the end would come too quickly. "Well…I guess I'd like to go back to when I first met my team."

"—and that is why you must always remember the Fires of Youth!"

"Gai-sensei!"

"Lee!"

"Gai-sensei!"

Neji yelped at the abrupt auditory overload compared to the smothered hush of the void. He would have fallen flat on his face if he hadn't suddenly found himself sitting down, and on an actual surface, not the vague somethingness of the limbo he had been in.

The change had been far more sudden than he had expected, not that he had really been expecting anything to happen at all. The last word had hardly left his mouth before the void had whipped out of existence around him, leaving him on the rooftop portico where he remembered meeting his team for the first time. Apparently Gai had just finished his introductory speech from the way Lee was reacting. Despite how extreme the behavior was, it couldn't be described as overreacting, not for Lee—Lee overreacting was terrifying to witness.

Since Gai was still occupied with his protégé, Neji was relieved to see that none of the others seemed to have noticed his sudden jolt. Tenten's gaze was fixed on the bespandexed pair, and Neji took this opportunity to examine himself.

His hands were predictably much smaller, and his hair a bit shorter and tied back instead of loose. That felt a bit off so he reached up and pulled the tie out, letting his hair fall free.

When he stretched slightly, he could tell that his musculature had a long way to go until he reached the peak that he had become accustomed to. Still, training under Gai-sensei would quickly start remedying that.

Remembering some of Gai's training regimes, Neji winced, briefly wondering if it had really been such a good idea to come back this far. Then he looked over at Tenten and decided that it had.

It was just after that, as he turned to see if Gai and Lee had quite finished yet, that he realized that he felt something missing: something Very Significant, in fact. The familiar presence—the nagging twinge that had been residing just behind his eyes from the time he was a child until his death—was gone.

The Caged Bird seal had been released when he died—and it hadn't come back with him.

This _changed_ things. Oh, did it ever change things.

For the past few minutes since he had been dumped out of the antechamber of the afterlife, Neji had assumed that he would just be a spectator, reenacting the events from his graduation until his death without much opportunity to make any alterations.

Now he realized that things were different. He could participate, and he planned to be a very, very active participant indeed.

For the first time, Hyuuga Neji was truly Master of his Destiny. And that was a very good feeling.

First, he needed to decide how best to use this new power. A good place to start, he decided, was with his own interpersonal relationships. While he didn't like admitting it, a great many of the reasons why his first time around hadn't been so pleasant had been his very own fault. Of course, he wasn't about to accept a green jumpsuit from Gai or anything ridiculous like that, but there were certainly reasonable adjustments he could make.

Such as, say, not trying to off Hinata. That would definitely help. In fact, Hinata was, and had always been, a much better person than he could understand. Even when he'd hated her he'd felt guilty for doing it, so letting go of all that tension would probably make his life a lot easier.

Also, if at all possible, he would like to avoid all the near-death experiences he'd had the misfortune of going through before his real-death experience. While Neji had a high pain tolerance, he wasn't self-sacrificial or masochistic enough to go through any of them again willingly. Not to mention there had been that one with the spiders which was just…ew. Never Again. (He could feel spider bits in his hair just thinking about it.)

Thinking of near-death experiences brought to mind his battle with Naruto in the chuunin exams, which would occur simultaneously more than four years ago and about eighteen months in the future. While the village pariah proving himself able to beat the proverbial stuffing out of the high-strung genius had turned out to be beneficial the first time, it had also been Very Painful and he didn't see the point of going through it again. Once had worked quite well enough to resolve some of his issues, thank you.

"And now, my Youthful students, I would like you to tell me your goals for the future!"

Neji could remember how that had gone down last time—he'd been shamefully antisocial and made fun of the others for being more optimistic. That would be a terrible way to start things off this time around, considering all that he'd just resolved to change. "I'm going to work on making my life better," he said—it was a vague enough statement that no one would understand what was really going on, and it sounded like the sort of thing Gai would like. He didn't voice the much less Youthful resolution he made simultaneously.

 _I am going to make Hiashi's life_ hell.

While things had improved between Neji and his uncle the first time around, that had only been after almost fourteen years of only partially self-inflicted misery for Neji, and due to the Caged Bird seal he had never been able to exact any form of payback. Things would be different this time, he decided with a smirk.

By this point, Lee had finished his speech about how he was going to be the best ninja ever despite not knowing any Ninjutsu, and for some reason all of the others were looking at Neji. He finally realized that, since they only knew the Neji from his old Academy days, they were probably expecting him to say something mean. While Neji didn't see a need for that now, Lee would require a rival in any timeline and he sure wasn't about to put Tenten in that position. That would result in them spending way too much time together, for one thing. Quality Training Time with Tenten was something Neji had no intention of relinquishing.

"That's a great goal, Lee," he said with complete honesty. "Of course, you'll never be able to beat me, but…good for you."

As Neji had expected, Lee took this as a declaration that they were now Eternal Rivals and began speechifying as such. He took this opportunity to glance over at Tenten again, only to find that she was looking at him strangely.

"Are you…feeling okay, Neji?" she whispered.

"I—" Neji swallowed down the words that he desperately wanted to say ( _I love you I'm sorry I forgot to say it before I died I thought I'd never see you again_ ). At this point, he would have barely associated with Tenten considering his aloof habits in the Academy, so a sudden confession of love would go nowhere and only confuse her further. "I'm fine."

"Okay…" Tenten sounded unsure, but also intimidated enough not to push him.

Tenten's self-introduction also went down approximately like he remembered it from last time, as she declared that she wanted to become strong enough to be Tsunade's successor. That goal had ended in disappointment last time, but Neji wasn't sure whether he could affect things enough to change that outcome. Perhaps there were other things he could do so that Tenten would not be so devastated when she failed.

"Well, my adorable students, now that we have gotten to know each other better it is time to begin our Youthful Training!" Gai declared. "Follow me to our training grounds!"

As Gai walked away with Lee bounding admiringly beside him, Neji stood up to leave, took a step—and fell flat on his face. Tenten, who had been just a moment behind him, tripped over his legs and ended up sprawling awkwardly across his torso.

Up to this point it hadn't occurred to Neji how cruel a mistress muscle memory would be. Apparently, shoving a deceased eighteen-year-old's consciousness into a living twelve-year-old's body was going to have some side effects, even if the eighteen-year-old and the twelve-year-old were technically the same person.

Neji remained still for a little while, enjoying Tenten's presence even if she did elbow him in the kidney while climbing off of him. The last time he had caught even a glimpse of her had been several hours before his death, and the last time they had properly spoken had been days before.

"Are you _sure_ you're okay?" Tenten asked, peering worriedly into his eyes. That action didn't really have a point to it, since due to the Hyuuga clan's Byakugan-caused aniridia there was no way to tell whether or not Neji's pupils were dilated. In the other timeline, she had figured this out after Neji had challenged Gai to a spar and been slammed into several unsuspecting trees.

"Yes, I'm fine," Neji repeated, although he was by this point certain the statement was becoming less believable every time it left his mouth. "I just—" he scrambled for an excuse and latched on the first one that sprang to mind "—skipped breakfast this morning." _Right, put 'practice thinking up halfway-decent excuses' on the to-do list,_ he thought as he realized how ridiculous that must have sounded.

"Well, if you're sure," Tenten said doubtfully as she stood up. Neji attempted to do so as well, only to slip again. He would have ended up scraping himself painfully if it weren't for the bandages on the arm he caught his weight with.

Neji couldn't remember the asymmetrical bandages ever serving a functional purpose. At some point in his Academy days he had adopted them because he thought they looked 'edgy' (not that he was ever going to say that word to anyone, ever), and he had just quit bothering a while after Naruto kicked some sense into him. He had altogether probably wasted several months of his too-short life putting them on every morning, and he resolved to abandon the practice sooner this time and just wear long sleeves or something.

Taking a deep breath, he tried standing again, bracing himself against one of the pillars of the portico. He made it all the way up this time, so he took an experimental step, forcing himself to use a shorter stride than he had for years. To his great relief, he managed it without another embarrassing faceplant.

"Let's go, Tenten," he said, and strode off (a little shakily) into his brand-new future.


End file.
